North Korea, Eyeing Election, Issues Stream of Insults at Bush

By JAMES BROOKE

Published: August 24, 2004

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 23—
North Korea called President Bush an ''imbecile'' and ''a tyrant that puts Hitler into the shade'' on Monday, unleashing a stream of insults that seemed to rule out any serious progress on nuclear disarmament talks before the American election this fall.

''The meeting of the working group for the six-party talks cannot be opened because the U.S. has become more undisguised in pursuing its hostile policy,'' a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry told the nation's state-controlled news agency. Preliminary talks were to be held in August, with high-level talks in September, as its neighbors and the United States seek to persuade Stalinist North Korea to stop manufacturing nuclear weapons.

The Monday tirade appeared to have been set off by a campaign speech in Wisconsin last week by Mr. Bush, who referred to Kim Jong Il, North Korea's hereditary leader, as a ''tyrant.''

South Korea's stock market largely ignored North Korea's outburst, rising slightly on Monday. South Korean experts, often optimists with regard to North Korea's behavior, speculated that the North was following a standard negotiating tactic of ratcheting up its polemics before settling down for real talks.

''North Korea has made an ultra-strong statement right before a very important set of negotiations; it is their typical tactic,'' Yun Duk Min, a professor at Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, a South Korean government institute, said in an interview on Monday.

But other analysts of North Korea have been saying in recent days that it appears to be suspending serious talks until its leaders know whom they will have to deal with in January: John Kerry or Mr. Bush.

''The negotiating process is stalled,'' Aleksandr Losyukov, who was Russia's negotiator at the talks until this spring and now is its ambassador to Japan, said in an interview last week. ''It is clear they have just refused to participate in talks before the American presidential election. There are expectations in Pyongyang of a change in American policy. Probably they are wrong.''

Mr. Kerry has indicated that if elected president, he would pursue direct bilateral talks with North Korea within the existing six-nation framework. But he has sharply criticized Mr. Bush for promising to pull out one-third of the 36,000 American troops here without winning any reciprocal military concession from North Korea.

''The North Koreans made it very clear, politely, that they want Mr. Kerry to win the election,'' said C. Kenneth Quinones, a former American diplomat, in a recent interview in Tokyo. He was in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, this month for a Korean studies conference. ''Nobody wants to move,'' he added. ''North Koreans are going to play wait and see.''

''The six-party talks have stabilized the situation,'' added Mr. Quinones, who worked on talks in 1994 that led to a first nuclear control accord with North Korea. ''But the process will require the U.S. to sit down with the North Koreans in a smoke-filled room for three months and bring out an agreement.''

In Pyongyang, official irritation with the United States increased with passage last month by the House of Representatives of the North Korean Human Rights Act, to support North Korean refugees in China. Increasingly nervous over the defector issue, the North has harshly criticized South Korea for bringing 460 North Korean refugees to Seoul last month.

In the Monday tirade, North Korea's diplomatic spokesman called Mr. Bush ''an imbecile, ignorant, a tyrant and a man-killer.''

''Bush's assumption of office turned a peaceful world into a pandemonium unprecedented in history as it is plagued with a vicious circle of terrorism and war,'' continued the statement, adding that Mr. Bush's aides and allies are ''a typical gang of political gangsters.''

Perhaps running low on adjectives and images, the spokesman warned that the American president is ''a bad guy.''

North Korean nervousness is expected to reach an even higher pitch in late October, when warships from the United States, Japan and other allied nations are to conduct joint exercises in the Sea of Japan. The maneuvers will be held under the banner of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a program intended to interdict seaborne illicit cargoes from an unidentified country. Previous training has taken place in locales distant from North Korea, like the Coral Sea, off the coast of Australia.

''They really believe that Bush and Koizumi are in a plot for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea,'' Mr. Quinones recalled of conversations in Pyongyang about Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi.

To calm spirits on the peninsula, South Korea's top nuclear negotiator is to visit China and Japan this week. Hoping to break the deadlock on setting up a round of working-level, preparatory talks on North Korea's nuclear program, Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo Hyuck will fly to Beijing on Tuesday for talks with his Chinese counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Wu Dawei. On Friday, Mr. Lee will visit Tokyo for talks with his Japanese counterpart, Mitoji Yabunaka.

Whatever the American election outcome, experts say, American negotiators next year will have to deal with a prickly nation, deeply insecure about American military power, clinging to nuclear bombs for their defense.

''They have wounded pride, a wounded conscience,'' said Mr. Losyukov, a veteran of many meetings with North Korean officials. ''Whether you like it or not, they are a small wounded nation trying to find a way to defend themselves.''